The Solovki special camp (later the Solovki special prison), was set up in 1923 on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea as a remote and inaccessible place of detention, primarily intended for socialist opponents of Soviet Russia's new Bolshevik regime.
At first, the Anarchists, Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries enjoyed a special status there and were not made to work. Gradually, prisoners from the old regime (priests, gentry, and White Army officers) joined them and the guards and the ordinary criminals worked together to keep the "politicals" in order.[1]
This was the nucleus from which the entire Gulag grew, thanks to its proximity to the first great construction project of the Five-Year Plans, the White Sea–Baltic Canal.
In one way, Solovki and the White Sea Canal broke a basic rule of the Gulag: they were both far too close to the border.[2] This facilitated a number of daring escapes in the 1920s;[3] as war loomed in the late 1930s it led to the closure of the Solovki special prison. Its several thousand inmates were transferred elsewhere, or shot on the mainland and on Solovki.
- ^ Babina-Nevskaya, Berta (1999). "My First Prison, February 1922". Till My Tale is Told. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. pp. 97–111. ISBN 0-253-33464-0.
- ^ Dmitriev comment[full citation needed]
- ^ Malsagov, S. A. (1926). Island Hell: A Soviet Prison in the Far North. London: Philpot. OCLC 4077341.